U.S. Military Strikes Drug Vessel From Venezuela, Killing 11

“There’s more where that came from,” Trump said in a news conference at the White House, promising further actions. 

Trump later posted on social media that he had ordered a strike on “positively identified” narcoterrorists from the cartel Tren de Aragua operating a small boat carrying drugs to the U.S. The strike resulted in the deaths of 11 “terrorists,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post showing a declassified video of the boat being struck and exploding. 

“Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!” Trump wrote.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. had conducted what he called “a lethal strike” against a drug vessel that departed from Venezuela and “was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization.”

A senior defense official confirmed that the Pentagon had conducted what was described as a precision strike against a drug vessel. Cocaine traffickers frequently use “go-fast” boats—vessels outfitted with three or four outboard motors—to race north from South America with cocaine.

The news comes after Trump last month ordered the Pentagon to send three Navy warships to interdict drug cartels off the coast of Venezuela, expanding the Pentagon’s role in fighting illegal drug smuggling and intensifying a U.S. confrontation with the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Earlier this year, Trump directed the Pentagon to prepare options to use military force against Latin American drug cartels, which he designated as foreign terrorist organizations in a January executive order.

There was no immediate comment from Maduro, who the U.S. deems an illegitimate leader for alleged election-rigging, drug trafficking and human-rights abuses. Late Monday, the Venezuelan strongman warned that Rubio was leading Trump down the path of war and promised to fight back if provoked. 

“If Venezuela were to be attacked, it would immediately pass to a period of armed struggle in defense of national territory,” Maduro said during a televised news conference, calling the U.S. buildup “the biggest threat our continent has seen in the last 100 years.” 

The news marks the first time the U.S. has acknowledged a military strike against Latin American drug cartels since Trump authorized the Pentagon to use force against them earlier this year. The U.S. Coast Guard and the navies of allied countries frequently target semi-submersible vessels and go-fast boats carrying drugs from Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and other countries. 

The Pentagon typically has played a supporting role to the Coast Guard in interdicting drug traffickers, but the Trump administration has expanded the military’s authority to directly engage the cartels. 

The Trump administration named the Tren de Aragua gang as a foreign terrorist organization in February, the first Venezuelan criminal organization to be so designated. In July, the Treasury Department also sanctioned the so-called Cártel de los Soles, a network of military officers that U.S. officials accuse Maduro of leading, as a specially designated global terrorist entity, citing its role in narcotics trafficking and support to Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel.

John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama with experience in antidrug operations in Latin America, said longstanding U.S. Coast Guard policies for stopping drug-trafficking vessels involve cutters carrying a law-enforcement detachment from the Coast Guard.

The units are usually led by a Coast Guard officer with as much as 24 months of legal training who is deputized to make arrests, he said. After identifying a ship hauling drugs, the Coast Guard attempts to get the crew to stop and give up. If the ship tries to flee, a sharpshooter manning a 50-caliber rifle aboard a helicopter can get the order to take out the engines.

“Everything is done to preserve life,” Feeley said. “What we don’t do is just shoot up boats like Netflix likes to pretend. We can shoot in self-defense, but we rarely do that because most narcos just give up.”

The Coast Guard then searches the boats for drugs. “You don’t know if there are drugs on board until after you board,” he said.

Spokespeople for the Pentagon referred questions to the White House. A spokesman for U.S. Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“The president is very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America, the whole might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels,” Rubio told reporters in Miami on the way to a trip in the region. “We’re going to take on drug cartels wherever they are, and wherever they’re operating against the interests of the United States.”

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com